Beginning My Data Analyst Journey

My first blog post. Neat!

Yesterday I decided to enroll in Google's Coursera course on data analytics. I'm honestly been pretty hyped about it and I think it shows in the progress I've made so far. I'm on track to complete the entirety of the first module tomorrow (the first of 8 modules in total). Currently, I've finished what was supposed to be "Week 4" of the course on only my second day (although I think the time estimates they give for the course are pretty generous).

The course itself I think is a bit of a mixed bag. A lot of the learning materials given are really nice. The fact that the course provides Google Drive links to make your own copies of notes, glossaries, journal entries, etc is very helpful. Also, I found the video content to be very nice, if not a bit slow (I mostly watch the videos on 2x speed to make up for it). The videos are comprised of people who work at Google describing the data analytics field and how they perform their job by applying the skills taught in the course. This approach with video content can make it seem a bit more personal than most online courses which I am a fan of. However, I'm very much not a fan of the discussion posts. Much like my courses in college, this course requires that you create your own discussion post and reply to two other people's posts. I find these activities to be pretty tedious and not actually conducive to learning anything. When I go to the discussion boards, a fair amount of the posts are one sentence long and don't actually contribute anything to the discussion. I imagine there isn't any actual entity to check if you've participated well enough in the discussion so these people are just making filler to get through these sections which kind of ruins the experience for everyone, in my opinion.

So far the course hasn't made me do any actual hands-on work though. It's just been drilling the basic concepts and laying out the foundations of data analytics, which has been pretty easy to do. The course actually had me take a diagnostic test where if you scored higher than 90% then it would suggest that you can go on a accelerated course for the program. I ended up scoring a 89% which, although not the best, I think is pretty decent for someone who's never actually worked with data analytics in any meaningful way before.

I imagine it will get harder to progress through this course once they actually have me programming in R and working in Google Spreadsheets to accomplish stuff but we'll see. I'm excited to learn about the capstone project that they are developing for the course. It's supposed to release mid-April so any day now I'll get to see what all of this is working up to.

I'll be sure to keep updating the blog as I progress through the course.

Until next time,
Ronald Linhardt

Command Palette

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